To Liberty! the Adventures of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas

by Catherine Johnson

  I did not know what to say. I was struck dumb. I had come ready for more humiliation.

  “Like you, I came from the islands. Like you, I am a product of the new France. Like me, you have more skill with a sword than your entire class. But your life will be twice, maybe three times, as hard as any of theirs.”

  I went to speak but he put out his hand to stop me.

  “For men like us, people of colour, it matters not whether we are counts or lords or knights. There will always be someone in our way, someone telling other people we are never good enough. They call us Americans, but they don’t believe we should be free.”

  I nodded. I knew he was right. Even in my fine clothes, there were always a few who would mock me in the street, stare at me as I passed. I knew that none of my classmates, the elegant sons of dukes and earls and princes, had ever wanted for anything. None of them had ever spent any time as a slave.

  The Chevalier went on. “So you will train three times as hard. With me, after class. Swords, épées, sabres, everything. You will be ten times as good as everyone else. And you will fight with grace and with honour at all times. In order to let that anger go, you will work and work and work until no one can best you. Are we clear?”

  I could not conceal my enthusiasm. “Yes, sir!” I said, and saluted the Chevalier in the old style, sweeping off my hat and bowing like a musketeer from a storybook.

  He smiled, then in one quick flowing movement threw me an épée so narrow and thin it might be a needle, and took the position, knees bent, his own sword in front of him.

  “First of all, I teach you to disarm your opponent,” he said. “Watch carefully. Believe me, young man, it could save your life one day.”

  His voice was fierce now, as he barked the order. “En garde!”

  Chapter Six

  1782, Paris

  I loved La Boissiere. After three years I could gallop down enemies, riding without any hands on the reins if needs be, and shoot – and hit – a moving target. The other boys stopped challenging me to fights as they came to realise they would never win, and I sought out new opponents instead: adults, grown men. The Chevalier, delighted, often set me up with men he knew from the Royal Guard, and I hardly ever lost to them, either. I heard later that the boys made up stories about me, and some of them were so far-fetched I wondered how anyone would believe them.

  Of course there were a few that concerned my skin – that I was the Chevalier’s secret child, that I practised some kind of island magic. But the most ridiculous one, I quite enjoyed. It goes like this:

  In the academy there was a covered riding arena, where we schooled the horses all year round, rain or snow or frost. The ground was sand, which we boys had to rake every day and the roof was held up with wooden crossbeams. More than once, I overheard the son of the Duc de St Gildas telling his friends that I was so strong that in a riding lesson he had seen me put up my hands to hold on to one of these beams, and lift up the horse I was on with my thighs!

  I never corrected him.

  My life at home was less exciting. My father never forbade me anything, but he could not look at me, and I thought – I hoped – that it was the weight of guilt at what he had done to his other children.

  Sometimes I would think of them when I woke up in the night, and then I would lay there until morning, unable to close my eyes again. I would dream of Maman, and she would be weeping at what had happened to us. Then sometimes I would dream that I had my own money – piles of it – and I would send it back to my brothers and sister, only to find that they hated me as much as I hated our father.

  And I did hate him. So much it burned, and so much that the words I needed to say to him would never come. He wished I would call him Papa again and laugh with him, but I couldn’t. To me he was Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie. The Marquis of Nothing. The Prince of Idiots. The man who sold his children for a title. And I wished more than anything that I wasn’t his son.

  I made up my mind to live my life as hard and as fast as I could. After all, I knew that one’s circumstances could change in an instant; for all I knew I might go from young count to slave in the blink of an eye. So as soon as I finished at La Boissiere, I took the advice of the Chevalier St George and took rooms in Paris.

  The relief at not having to see Father’s face or be reminded where my wealth came from was pure joy. I am ashamed to say I bought the finest clothes and boots and blades money could buy; my father’s money ran through my fingers like water, and I lived the life of a spoilt gentleman. I went to the theatre, I drank, I played cards. Some evenings I stayed up all night and talked politics with my friends in cafés – could there ever be freedom if some men were kings and others slaves? What made a Frenchman? How best to live a good life? Was being poor bad luck or one’s own fault?

  I was a count, my clothes were the best, the most expensive. I was exciting. I had many, many girlfriends.

  Of course there were words thrown at me in the street occasionally; that was only to be expected. The Chevalier had been right, of course, but he had taught me well too. I won many duels, and I felt that in spite of how some men might look at me, the streets of the greatest city in the world were mine. But even so, things had begun to shift.

  One evening I was sat at tables in the Palais with some friends I knew from the academy; Remy, whose father was a duke, and Fontaine, who had returned from travelling across Europe and thought he knew everything. We sat and debated freedom –

  “How can France be proud of herself while her people languish in poverty!” I said. “In slavery!”

  “Thomas, you are a dreamer.” Fontaine waved me off. “The king is our king for a reason...”

  “An accident of birth...” Remy chipped in.

  “You agree with me!” I said and turned to Fontaine. “Remy agrees!”

  Remy shrugged, though. “The English killed their king and then had to find another from Germany; perhaps someone has to do it.”

  “But do you believe in freedom?” I insisted.

  “Freedom!” Fontaine laughed. “No man is free, any woman less so. Our situation is decided at birth, always has been.”

  “You believe a person born to slavery should remain so, then?” I said.

  Fontaine shrugged. “If one is worthless enough to be enslaved, or born to a slave, what else is there?” He took a drink, he must not have seen my anger rising. “It is the same with poverty, my friend. Only a fool or a lazy man is poor.”

  “Did you learn nothing, man? On those travels of yours?” I was bristling. “You are the laziest man I know – if your logic follows, you would be the poorest too!”

  Fontaine was scowling now. He leaned forward across the table, jabbing his finger at the tabletop. “I am an aristocrat. It is only what I deserve.”

  I should have shut up then. But I could not. “So a child born to a beggar, faultless, blameless, deserves nothing? In fact deserves to suffer?”

  Fontaine shrugged. “It’s natural law.”

  I took a drink. “That is not a world I want to live in.”

  “You cannot change it, my friend! Nobody can.” Fontaine lifted his glass. “Freedom for some, perhaps. But I draw the line at freeing slaves or letting men vote; it is not natural and that’s an end to it.”

  I shook my head. I suddenly felt tired and sad. I might have been a count, but what good was that, when there were so many titled men like Fontaine – or like Remy, who agreed with me but would not stand firm and say so? I knew that Fontaine was wrong, that injustice could not simply be the natural order, but it would take so much more than one man if it were ever to be changed...

  Suddenly there was the sound of breaking glass – I broke out of my thoughts to realise a man at a table across from ours was being set upon.

  Before I could think, I was already striding across to stand between the man and his attackers, two small men with southern accents. And then, just as suddenly, the police had arrived.

  One of the southern men poin
ted at me. “It was him, the big American!”

  “I did nothing, sir! On my honour! I was only trying to help!”

  But nothing I said changed their minds. It took Remy and Fontaine to protest my innocence before they agreed to let me go.

  The young bloods were still arguing about politics and freedom as we left the café. I crossed the road in my finery and I thought that even though I had money and a title, they meant nothing. Why had I been so stupid as to believe a velvet jacket and fine manners might protect me from the poison within some men’s minds? Wherever I went, whatever I did, my skin would always speak the loudest.

  I was a fool to take my father’s coins, to think wearing his name was anything other than a kind of disguise. What was the use of it? That title could no more persuade the police of my innocence than it could convince Fontaine and his ilk that other men my colour should be free.

  I had told myself that I was spiting my father by spending his money, but really I knew all this time I had been pleasing him by eating from his hand. I had let myself grow comfortable on a lie.

  No more, I decided. That night as I walked home, I resolved to change my path.

  In June, I gave back the keys to my expensive apartment. I parcelled up my fine clothes and said goodbye to my horse, Gunsmoke, and I went to the army barracks to the north of Paris, where they were enrolling for the Queen’s Dragoons. Even in my plainest clothes I looked richer than most, but I joined the queue of ordinary men waiting to join up. I had become twenty-four that year. Perhaps here at last I might be able to make some sort of a difference.

  “American! Hoi! American!” A man pushed in ahead of me. “You won’t last long in the Dragoons, the Spanish will see you coming a mile off!”

  His fellows laughed, but I stayed put. “This is my country,” I said. “And I will fight to prove it.”

  I felt in my pocket for the letter I had received from my father when I told him of my plans, and I took it out as I stood in line. I could almost feel his fury in the paper. He had summoned me home – he would cut me off! No son of his would join the rank and file as a private! A common soldier! I should be an officer! And the Dragoons? Cannon fodder! Food for sabres! Didn’t my family tree go back five hundred years? Had he paid out all that money to the academy for nothing?

  I hadn’t replied.

  At the head of the queue there was a table with a register, where we signed our names. The man who’d pushed in, took off his cap when he reached the front.

  “Name?” The sergeant at the desk barked the question.

  “The name’s Jacques Piston,” he said, “but I don’t know my letters,” and he signed an X instead.

  “Next!” The sergeant looked up at me, pen poised. “Come on, man!”

  “I can write,” I said, and took the quill and dipped it in the inkwell. I took a breath, then wrote: Alex Dumas. The name my mother gave me. Now, even though her grave might be forgotten, she never would be. Every time they called my name – Private Dumas – I would think of her.

  As I stepped away from the table I felt as if a weight had left my shoulders. My old name, my title – I had finally left them behind.

  I took the letter out of my pocket and tore it up with a kind of giddy elation. The wind took the scraps of paper. I would never speak to him again, I decided then. I would be my own man now: plain Alex, son of Marie Cessette Dumas.

  Thirteen days later, I heard news of my father’s death. I did not attend his burial; I felt nothing at the news and wanted nothing he had left behind. I did not want to be a marquis. I was no longer a count. I was no longer a gentleman, and for the first time since Father sold me to Captain Langlois all those years ago on the island, I felt as if I was free.

  Chapter Seven

  1786, Laon, Northern France

  Father had been right about one thing: the army thought we were disposable. The Queen’s Dragoons were looked down upon, by the King’s Own Dragoons especially, but by everyone else as well. We were a light cavalry unit, and in wartime we did the dirty jobs: taking out snipers, defusing traps, holding bridges until the regular troops could come through, and so on. In peacetime they used us against smugglers, against highwaymen.

  But no amount of scorn from other regiments could make me regret my choice. At least they wore it on their sleeve! I felt alive for the first time in years and I made the best friends, not least Jacques Piston, the man who’d pushed ahead of me in the queue.

  There was a camaraderie between us Dragoons that I had never felt with the other spoilt gentlemen’s sons at the academy. We trained hard with our horses, and our guns. Louis Espagne called me “cowboy” after I galloped down after a band of smugglers, reins in my teeth, guns in both hands. I felt like that fourteen-year-old boy, galloping on the beach back home in Saint-Domingue, again.

  Jacques had the measure of me. We were in an inn one evening, close to the barracks. I had rounded up a gang of salt smugglers and the wine was flowing.

  “Our Dumas is a show-off!” he said, lifting his glass. “To Alex, the hero of the Dragoons!”

  I did not argue. As I looked around at my new friends I thought they were more than simply mates or comrades. “To our new family!” I lifted my glass.

  Louis cheered and filled the glasses again. “Another toast!” he said. “You think of one, Alex, you’re better at this lark.”

  I stood up and thought a second, then raised my glass high. “All for one!” I said. “And one for all!” The inn resounded with all our cheers.

  Suddenly the celebration stopped. A party of the King’s Own regiment, our sworn enemies, had entered by another door. They looked at us as if we were no more than the turd on their boots. One swept off his hat and put it down on the bar, and he sneered at us as he ordered his drink.

  “I see the queen doesn’t care if Americans fight for her honour.”

  Jacques stood up. “He isn’t American! He’s as French as the rest of us!”

  No lie, but I felt a prickle in my throat. I sat still for a moment. The king’s men jeered.

  “Can’t the gorilla speak? Or is his head as empty as any one of your queen’s men?”

  I stood up, pushing the table away. “No one speaks to any one of us like that!”

  The king’s man at the bar sneered. “You talk like a posh boy but you look like a gorilla! Do they duel in the trees?”

  I glared at my tormentor. He was almost as tall as me, and strong about the shoulders. He might have been a boxer for all I knew, but I reckoned my years with the Chevalier had done me good.

  “You can talk to my blade!” I spat the words.

  “You? A swordsman?” he said. He looked at me with disgust. I longed to wipe that sneer off his face.

  “Right here,” I said. “Now. Or are you afraid?” I took off my jacket. “If I am a gorilla, it will not take you long to dispatch me... sir.” I said the word like a curse, and his face flushed.

  The innkeeper hustled us out into the road, and we chose our seconds and lined up. I took my regimental sword and weighed it in my hand. It was nothing like the fine flashy blades I had learned with at La Boissiere, and I realised as I held it that it had been a long time since I had practised anything like a formal duel. Maybe I had made a mistake. My second, Jacques, whispered to me, “Are you sure? It’s not too late to walk away...”

  But I knew I couldn’t. I handed Jacques my hat and smiled with a confidence I wasn’t sure was mine, yet.

  When I turned back, my enemy had his jacket off too. We faced each other, swords up. He was older than me, I reckoned, but not by much.

  The shout came. “Fight!”

  I let the sword guide me. He advanced and I parried, metal against metal. I looked into his hard grey eyes and thought of all the men who had ever wronged me, and I knew I could not let him win.

  A crowd had gathered. I tried to shut out the sound. The king’s man lunged towards me, his blade cutting the air next to my cheek. I only ducked out of the way at the last minute
. I parried again, thinking of what the Chevalier had told me: I must work three times as hard. I attacked, he knocked my sword away and I felt a sharp sting on my forehead. Then the smell, a tang of metal that I knew was blood. He was smiling now. He had cut me. I had to wipe the blood from my face.

  I saw Jacques’ face, he looked afraid. I could not lose – not merely for myself, but for my comrades, my regiment. My brothers.

  “We are not finished, sir!” I said, and put up my sword in readiness again.

  The man sneered. “Do you want to die, American?”

  I attacked, and he swatted me away. I gritted my teeth, tried to concentrate and remember my lessons. He came for me again, I parried – yes! Success – his blade turned away just in time. Then a twist of my wrist, a flick – my opponent’s sword clattered to the floor. I stepped back. The crowd cheered.

  I put out a hand. But his face was a picture of rage and indignation.

  “Beaten by an American and a Queen’s Dragoon,” I said. The cheer that went up from my comrades sent the King’s Own men scurrying back to their camp.

  Or at least we thought it had.

  We went back into the inn and called for more wine. But before we could open the bottle, there were two more challengers wanting to regain the honour of the King’s Own Dragoons. They called me American – and worse, much worse.

  “Alex, forget it, you have nothing to prove. We know who you are.” Jacques poured me a drink and clasped my shoulder warmly. “One of us.”

  I took the measure of these challengers, one taller than me, one shorter. I was full of the confidence of victory. I looked round at my comrades at the bar. Jacques was not lying; they would not care if I didn’t fight. But I did.

  I stood up, and handed Jacques my hat and jacket. “Hold these. I bet you two sous I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  I slept sounder that night than I ever had in my life. I needed the regiment sawbones to put a couple of stitches in the cut on my cheek, which I received in the last bout, but I won every fight. Now the whole regiment knew me. I was a mascot; a lucky charm. And I was as French as the rest of them.